Since working in domestic staffing where I’m the chef and they are house cleaners or gardeners, I love working with them, and they have always liked having a muscular white guy who has their backs when the owner is a dick. Which they all are.
On a funny note, this guy is 100% on point.
My brother went to Princeton but I’m not going to ruin my evening by listening to that accent.
What accent would that be?
The NJ one.
Not talking about my brother, he grew up moving around the world like me, and can speak about six languages now, so who knows what the fuck he sounds like at this point.
I’ve had people comment that I have an accent but they never guess a place I’ve actually lived.
Your brother did not get a NJ accent from going to Princeton. I thought you were going to make some comment about some kinda hi’falutin’ nasal tone, to be honest.
I can’t hear it (obviously), but everyone tells me I have a New Yawk accent, probably because I lived there for over 30 years. College is only 4 years.
I should have been more clear - I was thinking about Jersey Shore and the dude I posted from Mississippi as dueling accents.
My brother was learning Hebrew, German, Aramic, and Afrikaans, and now lives in Columbia.
I see what you did there.
I never met a single kid that talked like Pauly D or Snooki.
What? They were so many of them swarming around, like ants.
You have also invited @zecarlo to express his wrath.
Not at Princeton, no. And the area is positively bucolic for a Northeast state.
Plenty of super nice neighborhoods in NJ in general, but there are definitely wide swaths of “armpit” environs there as well.
My son applied to Princeton - had the grades and the SAT’s but did not get in. My brother went to Stanford. My son would have been a legacy there - Stanford extends it to nieces and nephews. Had the grades and SAT’s to meet the minimums.
He is not a minority. DEI, etc… He gets it. Not many Irish French kids check the DEI boxes.
He doesn’t give a shit. He is thrilled to go to UCONN and be in the marching band with a bunch of other nerds.
That’s all that matters.
Congratulations to him, and you - this must be a fun point.
Here’s my theory on smart kids that I shared with my son:
“You get a lot more, like 99-100%, out of your classes. Dumb kids only get about 30-50% of what is there to be gotten.”.
Your kid will do great no matter where he goes. Name is nice, I guess, but even the admin seem to be doing their best to ruin that.
That sounds accurate.
At some point you start missing certain fundamental building blocks that the next layers are built on, and you literally can’t advance any further.
Some people start at the end of the Jenga game.
A good educator should be able to quickly find those gaps and fill them in. Unfortunately 1) nobody does that, and 2) ego and pride usually gets in the way.
Sometimes the problem goes the other way though. “I can do my own thing and still learn everything, so why do I need to listen to the teacher?”
What pisses me off is I don’t have a good answer.
This is in kindergarten.
Glad to hear it
TBH, I have a lot of guilt around this. I am so proud of him, but I moved out when he was eleven.
I am also very proud of my daughter, she is finishing up her Junior year and doing well.
I am not sure proud is the right adjective. It feels like I am taking some credit when the credit belongs to them.
It;s a weird world.
Thats tough! I’ve been a lot more fortunate than I am skilled when it comes to kids & school.
Thou was (and still is when used) always singular and informal. You was both plural and informal singular. As the language evolved to stop using thou, you still remained ambiguous.
English is a conglomeration of languages, but primarily Germanic. Thou is the Anglicized version of tu, the singular of you in romantic languages.
Pretty sure it is subjective, but I was never good at grammar. I got better teaching it, diagramming sentences (I was that asshole), but I am not sure what the plural would be.
That phrasing is a bit ambiguous.
One way to read that is that English just assimilated the Latin “tu”, and spelled it “thou”. Like how Latin’s “errare” became English’s “error”.
But the other way to read it is that English “thou” and Latin “tu” share a common root. In English, PIE *tu- became Old English “þu” and then “thou”. In Latin, PIE *tu- became Latin “tu”.
“Anglicized version” could go either way.
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EDIT: “egregius errare” is an incredible de-Anglicized, re-Latinized spelling.
Potato, potato.
I am not sure of the origin of thee though, thinks thou thoughts that theoretically are theses that we should consider?
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
–James D. Nicoll